They belong to a very small and extremely unusual club that has only 142 members. The factor that unites them is that they have all experienced America's capital punishment system at first hand, yet lived to tell the tale.

This is the club of death row exonerees. Its members include Kirk Bloodsworth, the first death row inmate to be exonerated by DNA evidence in 1993 and now an anti-death penalty campaigner of national renown.

Then there is Damon Thibodeaux, who walked free last September, an innocent man, from the notorious Angola prison in Louisiana where he spent 15 years in the shadow of the death chamber. And the only woman in this peculiar group, Sabrina Butler, who was wrongfully sentenced to death by Mississippi in 1990 for killing her nine-month-old son, compounding the grief of a teenaged mother who had lost her first born, as it later transpired, to liver failure.

Now a pair of film-makers from London are planning to profile this exceptional club of death row exonerees in a creative experiment that will see them travel 4,500 miles across the US in an RV, in which they will drive, eat, sleep and edit as they go in what they hope will be a ground-breaking interactive documentary project. They are calling it One for Ten – after a simple but harrowing fact: that since the death penalty resumed in America after a hiatus in 1976, there have been 1,323 executions and 142 exonerations.

In other words, for every 10 prisoners executed, another one has been allowed to walk free because the death sentence was found to be unreliable.

"Whether or not you agree with the death penalty, that's an outrageous level of failure," says Will Francome, who will be hitting the road next month [April] along with his film-making partner Mark Pizzey. "The consequences of such glaring flaws are horrifying – if you get the death penalty wrong it's irreversible."

The 30ft RV will embark from New York on 11 April, and end up in Las Vegas on 18 May. The idea is that in the course of five intense weeks, the team will meet and make an internet film about 10 exonerees, each one representing a different critical problem with the application of the death penalty in America.

Through the individual narratives of the 10, Francome and Pizzey hope to highlight the many ways in which US capital punishment fails to deliver on its promise of only putting onto death row those who are guilty beyond even the minutest doubt. The 10 have been carefully chosen to elucidate those problems – from misidentification of suspects, to false and coerced confessions, prosecutorial misconduct, atrociously poor representation by defence lawyers and bad forensic science.

The project's creators hope that in addition to highlighting the injustices of capital punishment, One for Ten will also break new ground in terms of documentary film making. They have devised the road trip as an interactive process in which individuals can participate from start to finish.

They have crowd-funded the operation, raising £18,000 ($27,500) from web donations and a further £14,000 ($21,300) from companies and foundations – enough to get the RV rolling, though they are still hoping to raise a further £50,000 ($76,000) to fulfill all their creative ambitions. Musicians and animators have also contacted the production team offering their services having read about the project on the web.

They've added a sprinkling of star power, with Danny Glover narrating the pilot and Jeremy Irons also on board for some of the 10 live films. The filming proper will kick off on 12 April in Philadelphia with Kirk Bloodsworth as subject, and at that point One For Ten will invite people following them on social media to submit questions to the exonerees and give feedback on how they think the films are going.

It's a tight and gruelling schedule. The pair aim to film, edit and post two films each week, allowing them to profile 10 exonerees over the five weeks of the project. That gives them three or four days to make each five-minute film from scratch, during which time they not only have to meet and film each subject, but also have to drive long distances – from Philadelphia to Ohio, Illinois, Minessota, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and New Mexico – editing as they go.

Once the five weeks are done, and each film is posted, Francome and Pizzey intend to hold a Google hangout to allow people to discuss the films that have gone up. At the end of the five weeks they will make all the unedited footage they have collected available for free use on a digital archive.

"We wanted to see what we could do with the documentary form that was different from the traditional conversation," says Pizzey. "We've done a lot of TV and film work in the past that was very one-way, and this time we're seeing what happens if you make it much more interactive."

But in the last analysis, this will be a project about the iniquities of the ultimate punishment. As Ray Krone – the 100th death row exoneree, who was released in 2002 on DNA evidence having spent 10 years awaiting execution – puts it in the pilot film: "Being on death row, seeing what happens, seeing the inability of our system to get it right, to really get to the truth, to have a punishment that you can't reverse so that when you find out you made a mistake … that's just unacceptable."

The Guardian will be joining One For Ten on the road to follow the progress of the project